The Liferay Marketplace is an integral part of the Liferay Portal experience. Starting with Liferay Portal 6.2, the Marketplace plugin is required to be installed alongside Liferay Portal. The Marketplace plugin enables a host of features that extend beyond just access to the online Liferay Marketplace. Some of the key features the Marketplace plugin enables are:
- Liferay Marketplace: direct access to our online Marketplace
- App Manager: ability to install, uninstall, and update apps
- Bundled Apps: easily manage apps that may come bundled with your Liferay Portal
- Developer Apps: ability to manage apps that you’re developing
- License Manager: streamlined license management for your Liferay Portal and apps
The portal installation process attempts to deploy and register the Marketplace plugin automatically. If your environment supports/allows 1) hot deploy and 2) full database rights, the automatic deploy process takes care of itself. Many companies (especially in a production environment), however, limit automated processes and/or database access. Additionally, certain application servers (eg., WebSphere) do not support hot deploy, so you may need to deploy the Marketplace plugin manually. Depending on your environment’s restrictions, you may need to follow one or more of the steps below to install the Marketplace plugin properly.
Server is Firewalled without Access to the Internet
Your server may be behind a firewall that prevents access to the Internet, or your security policy may not allow direct download and installation from the Internet. In these cases, you have 2 options:
-
From an Internet-enabled computer, download the Marketplace plugin from here. Then allow Liferay to auto deploy it by dropping the downloaded .lpkg file into the Liferay deploy folder.
-
From an Internet-enabled computer, download the Marketplace plugin. Then use the Liferay App Manager to deploy the plugin.
Detailed instructions can be found under Installing Plugins Manually.
Application Server Does Not Support Hot Deploy
If your application server does not support hot deploy, you can’t leverage Liferay’s auto deploy feature. You can, however, manually deploy the plugin in two steps:
-
Use Liferay’s tools to pre-deploy the file.
-
Then use your app server’s tools to do the actual deployment.
This is because Liferay makes deployment-time modifications to the plugins right before they are actually deployed to the application server. Detailed instructions can be found under Deploy Issues for Specific Containers.
Limited Database Access
Some production environments do not have the necessary database permissions for Liferay and its plugins to maintain their tables. In these cases:
-
Grant the ID Liferay uses to access the database temporary full rights to the database.
-
Install Liferay and have it create the database.
-
Once the database is created, remove the permissions for creating tables and dropping tables from the user ID.
Detailed instructions are available here. It should be noted that most sophisticated Liferay apps–not just the Marketplace plugin–require new tables when deployed. If your environment restricts database access, you may need to repeat the above steps whenever you deploy a new app to the Liferay Portal.